Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon New York 2013

The second annual QCon New York brought together together over 500 team leads, architects, project managers, and engineering directors. Over 100 practitioner-speakers presented 75 technical sessions and 19 in-depth tutorials over the course of five days.

Based on the QCon New York 2013 attendee survey, 57.64% of respondents are readers of InfoQ.com and 92.86% of respondents would recommend QCon to a colleague. This was also the first year where attendees had a chance to:

Participate in facilitated open spaces which were held daily for each of the 15 tracks

Access all QCon New York 2013 presentation videos within 24 hours after the talk (note: these will all be published on InfoQ.com in the coming months).

The top 10 presentations this year, based on a combination of session feedback and attendance were:

Managing Experimentation in a Continuously Deployed Environment, by Will Stuckey

Lessons Learned Building Storm, by Nathan Marz

This article summarizes the key takeaways and highlights from QCon New York 2013 as blogged and tweeted by attendees. Over the course of the coming months, InfoQ will be publishing most of the conference sesssions online, including 29 video interviews that were recorded by the InfoQ editorial team. The publishing schedule can be found on the QCon New York web site.

Wil Stuckey spoke about how Continuous Delivery enables continuous experimentation at Etsy, with 30+ daily production releases facilitating a culture of Validated Learning. Wil described how Etsy uses an in-house feature toggle engine to continuously perform A/B testing, and grow product revenues as a result. …

While the quality of presentations and conversations in the track was exceptional throughout, Wil’s talk on driving product revenues via continuous experimentation validated the Continuous Delivery value proposition and should be mandatory viewing for anyone with an interest in rapidly releasing software.

As usual Big Data and Mobility were the dominating topics in this conference. Surprisingly, there was a strong html5 presence as well. At least ten presentations (including mine) were based on html5 or other modern language themes, which means the momentum is shifting from native apps to html 5 fast. It is not about just plain vanilla JavaScript anymore.

One thing I can vouch for is that the development crowd seems to be getting younger and sharper on a daily basis.

Opinions about QCon

@slippy51: I know I at geeky conference because I keep getting compliments on Voltron shirt. #qconnewyork

@slippy51: I know I at a really geeky conference because some actually translated the Japanese writing on my Voltron shirt. #qconnewyork

@zef: Very inspiring environment at #QConNewYork. A lot of ideas that have been stewing in my head for months and years all start to click.

@ajay_aggarwal: Great experience #qconnewyork meeting with some of the smartest people in the industry.

Conclusion

The second annual QCon New York brought together 500 attendees and more than 100 speakers, providing deep insights into real-world architectures and state of the art software development practices, from a practioner’s perspective. QCon's focus on practitioner-driven content is reflected in the fact that the program committee that selects the talks and speakers is itself comprised of technical practitioners from the software development community. QCon New York was produced by InfoQ.com. QCon New York will continue to run in New York around June of every year. QCon also returns to San Francisco this November and in sunny Sao Paulo, Brazil next month. QCon London, Beijing, and Tokyo will take place next year in the March to April timeframe. Presentations and interviews from QCon New York event will be posted on InfoQ over the coming months.